(From my wild-ish writing practice this week with my Friday morning sangha)

Spark Poem: “All the Ways to Name a Dragonfly” by Ellen Rowland

I say my mantra is this, tell it to people — some who get it and some who immediately want to argue with the premise, what I say everything I write about is really about, and it is this: “This is terrible, keep going.” As I walked under the pink, orange, and then gold and blue light of the sunrise sky, the tips of my fingers stiff and red with the cold, Ringo next to me wearing his coat and searching for the perfect stick, most of the trees are now bare but that fact only makes room for the colors of the sky and highlights the few left still dressed in gold, lit up by the sunrise, and I think to myself, “What if this is heaven?”

And I realize that may go against my mantra, that this is terrible, but immediately I think “What if it’s both?” This is terrible, and hello, you beauty? It is all of it, all jumbled together, the rough husk and every fault, fear, scab, and scar, all of it lit up and golden, the beauty of it stopping me in my tracks as I stare and wonder at it with every step, every breath, at every turn. “Hello, you beauty” walking the same trail as “this is terrible” and that feeling no right or good but whole, holy, every part of it a prayer, a reckoning. And no matter which one, no matter the bruise, you sink your teeth in and bite anyway.

You keep going, making a list of everything you love, getting up every morning, alive and in a body, your first thought being both “this is terrible” and “hello, you beauty,” but always, always wake up, get up, keep going into this day you’ve never met, dressed in the rough husk of all you are, tender and open and sad as always.

Spark Poem: “Never Tell Me the Odds (A Pragmatist’s Guide to Faith)” by Kyle Tran Myhre

A human with every reason to quit…doesn’t. That’s it right there, the heart of the matter, the secret, what it will take. This simple fact — you have every reason to quit, to give up, to not go ong, and yet you don’t. You keep going, “star-dressed survivor,” what Andrea Gibson called the Angel of the Get-Through, what Tibetan Buddhism calls the tender broken open-hearted warrior, what goes by a million other names, lives in an infinite number of other forms, including the stars and the dirt, and it just keeps going, against all odds of its existence, the millennia trying to murder it, it just keeps going, welcome or not welcome, still here.

And this is what I already said before, just with different words, that this is the art of drawing breath, the way we survive, as Pema Chödrön says, there’s room for all of it, the grief and the joy, that it isn’t about getting it right or being good because things come together and they fall apart, over and over, again and again, forever and ever, still here, star-crossed survivors, angels of the get-through with their tender broken hearts, this singing when you forgot how to pray. We just keep on keeping on.

And this is important, and I hadn’t said it before it got lost in all the not giving up and the keep going, but there’s also the rest, the necessary rest, because without sleep, without rest, without dreaming, there is no waking up, no hello, you beauty to the first thing you see, no meeting the sunris, no day you’ve never met before.

Spark Poem: “With Astonishing Tenderness” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

That morning as I was reviewing the three poems I chose to spark our practice, I worried they didn’t fit together, that this last one was an afterthought, picked simply because it was a bit shorter and poems from Rosemerry seem to work no matter what and in the final read before we were to meet, I wasn’t sure about this one, lost the thread, couldn’t see the connection, worried it might be unrelated, but then as I read it after we wrote and shared after the first two, it fell into place, made sense, saying as it does how we talk to ourselves with our softest voice, how we don’t have to fight what is real, that this, whatever this is for each of us, doesn’t need for everything to be right before it arrives, that when it comes, in the dark with its own darkness, it will meet us where we are, wide awake in the middle of the night, thinking we got it wrong and that we failed, but no, it will assure us, “oh, sweetheart” it will say, “hello, you beauty” it will insist, this is not yet the end of the story, keep going, don’t give up, even though yes this is terrible and sometimes sleep won’t come, this is heaven, this matters too.

We are alive, we are singing when we don’t know how to pray, we are collecting the seeds, feathers, and lost poems, we are counting the weeds in our garden, making a salad out of the dandelions and crowns from the daisies, making lists of everything we love, with astonishing tenderness, holding the bits of our broken hearts in our open hands.